Monday
I’m interested in discovering how ubiquitous technologies can be used more effectively and creatively in the classroom. Often, this happens when the medium (the specific technology) matches the message (the skills or content that students will be exploring). The stories below are examples of what that looks like in practice – that is, what this all means for Monday.
Alice: A Social Network for Atoms and Adams
Alice is a prototype for a social network I designed in 2008. It’s based on a project I did with my seventh graders in 2006, which asked them to adopt the identity of a Revolutionary War figure and interact with each other in character. We did this using Ning, a social network that’s designed to allow a single person to join multiple networks and build out different profiles.
This concept takes advantage of what social networks are especially good at: they allow users to interact within a system. Students investigate relationships like these all the time, in the context of ecosystems or literary conflicts or political dynamics. Using a social network for this purpose makes sense because the medium is, in fact, the message; students interact in the very system they’re learning about. Ideally, the social network would “value” some inputs more than others in the same way that true systems involve hierarchy and power relationships, but Ning – and other conventional social networks – do not yet operate like this. This is the difference between Alice and my Ning project; an Alice network would respond to user input in a dynamic way.
The best documentation of an Alice-like project that I’m aware of can be found online at PBS Frontline’s Digital Nation. I worked with Jenny Johns, an 8th grade English Language Arts teacher at IS 339 in the Bronx, to use Ning as a way of teaching To Kill a Mockingbird in 2008. Digital Nation, which aired in February 2010, examined how technology has changed the way we live.
The Blog Mentor Program
There’s a difference between blogging-as-publishing and blogging-for-interaction. Blogging-as-publishing feels like essays on the Internet, looks like content that isn’t relevant outside of the classroom, and reads like This is a school assignment. Blogging-for-interaction takes advantage of what blogs are so good at: It invites authentic comments, prompts conversation, and lives beyond the classroom.
The Blog Mentor Program is designed for interaction. It’s a project that Ben Himowitz, Dave Prinstein and I put together when the 300 8th graders at IS 339 began using laptops in a 1:1 environment in 2008. The idea was that every student would have a blog and a corresponding mentor, based on a student’s interests and talents. The mentor would be responsible for giving supportive and critical feedback in the blog’s comments, thereby alleviating the stress on a single classroom teacher to keep up with 60 blogs. The intent of the project is documented here by Pat Wagner, who also helped to get this going.
We hit all kinds of problems, most of which were logistical and reflected a failure on our part to guarantee that students, teachers and mentors were all participating. But we also saw this take off with a few kids: Franklin began blogging about food for the school’s newspaper, and a number of teachers got engaged in a conversation about student writing that took a very encouraging tone.
The Blog Mentor Program is a strong idea – a local food critic mentoring an aspiring chef, for example – and I’m unfamiliar with a similar effort that’s been more successful. But, there are other great examples of how blogging can extend a classroom conversation beyond the classroom:
The Secret Life of Bees – a project in Will Richardson’s classroom in 2003 that invited Sue Monk Kidd to join the classroom conversation about her book, online
The Alice Project – a project in Christian Long’s classroom in 2009 that inspired his students to deconstruct The Annotated Alice in a series of team blogs that were presented to a virtual “jury”
This Big Planet: A project in Little Big Planet, ecology, and one sixth grade science class
Little Big Planet is a game for the PlayStation 3 that allows users to design their own levels and share them with other players. This Big Planet is a project that moved LBP into the classroom by taking advantage of one aspect of what the game is good at: Four players can collaborate simultaneously to accomplish tasks that one player cannot complete alone. So, LBP seemed perfect to integrate into a unit on ecosystems because students could use the game to interact with each other in an environment that resembles its biological counterpart.
The mechanism I designed to illustrate this was a four-part machine that required the participation of four players to operate. Without full cooperation, the machine wouldn’t work. But, each player could choose to harm another player in a way that was meant to mimic the hierarchy of a food chain. I worked with Ben Taylor, a 6th grade science teacher at IS 339 in the Bronx, to integrate the game into his ecosystems unit, and the project is documented here.
The project was successful in a lot of ways, and its the only documentation of in-classroom use that I know of. But many others are getting interested in how LBP can be used for learning; the MacArthur Foundation, through its Digital Media and Learning initiative, will be funding the development of LBP levels in 2010. For other information on how games are being integrated into the classroom into a substantive (not Math-Blaster-like) kind of way, see:
Quest to Learn, a new school in New York City founded by Katie Salen – who led the class at Parsons I developed this project in – that believes learning is game-like
Games for Change, a non-profit that’s interested in how video games can be put to social interest
Games, Learning and Society, a group based at UW-Madison that hosts an annual conference and examines how games are changing the way we learn
